That Money Was Just Resting In My Account

A few years ago I wrote about David Tennant's (or more accurately writer Steven Moffat's) TV portrayal of a priest at the centre of a safeguarding storm and how far it seemed from any remotely credible depiction of how someone in that position would react. Now I find myself able to add to the sequence of bizarre media depictions of clergy in crisis, as The Archers' Alan Franks seems to have managed to avoid all the safeguarding courses the rest of us have to go on in just the same way as Inside Man's Fr Harry Watling had. The incumbent of Ambridge is a man of long and challenging experience, and yet when he gave dying parishioner Carol Tregorran his own bank details so she could make a donation to St Stephen's Church for flowers, anyone but him could see where the storyline was going a mile off. Now he finds himself the next best thing to suspended, unable to handle the parish's money and chaperoned in every pastoral encounter by a churchwarden, after Carol, unbeknownst to him, transferred several thousand pounds his way the day before she died, and her daughter made a formal complaint after discovering what had happened. 

The Archdeacon turned up on Revd Franks's doorstep and in their awkward encounter played the straightest of bats, correctly insisting there was a process that now had to be followed. It was the supposedly experienced priest's reaction that made me boggle. 'But I'm innocent!' the scriptwriters have him cry, apparently never having given a moment's thought in all his ministry to how these things pan out. Even if I hadn't been included in several cases which have involved the Diocesan Safeguarding Department, I would have known what happens through training and Church news outlets. For heaven's sake, a quarter of the bench of bishops are signed off duty at the moment for irregularities of varying sorts, you can't avoid that. 'Ray, how long have we known each other?' Alan pleads with the Archdeacon, as though that could or should make any difference, as though 'Ray-how-long-have-we-known-each-other' doesn't reflect exactly the attitude which has got the Church of England and other once-trusted organisations into the pickle they find themselves now. Where has he been? How come all these media clergy never seem to have done the training I've had to do? Repeatedly? Or be subject to the Clergy Discipline Measure?

He has a bit of a habit of this, does Alan Franks. Not so long ago he seemed utterly bewildered by how to handle a contentious baptism request when the answer was obvious, and last year reacted so unclerically to a pair of local teenagers who were terribly apologetic for accidentally breaking a vicarage window with an errant cricket ball that listeners asked questions about his mental health. Now, as is his wont, he has decided that his accuser 'feels I have wronged her ... I have to try to treat her with grace', while it's Mrs Vicarage Usha's turn to be furious and make churchwarden Neil Carter thoroughly uncomfortable with what in court would be unconscionable attempts to influence someone who needs to maintain strict procedure - and Usha, remember, is a lawyer, who of all people should be aware of how the system has to work. All it needs now is for Alan's daughter Amy who we haven't heard from in about 15 years to take out a contract on his accuser's life. Or maybe the Archdeacon's.